Читать книгу Brute - Con Sellers - Страница 5

The New Opal Hotel wasn’t new any longer, but it was still shiny with a cheap, touched-up glitter. It was smaller than he remembered, too; at least from the outside.

Brad Saxon stood on the narrow sidewalk, oblivious to the traffic clangor behind him, to the hurrying, chattering throng that swirled around him. Nine years and six thousand miles of ocean rolled back; he was a young trooper again, a little drunk, a little eager for his first taste of the vaunted Japanese women. Nine years? It couldn’t be.

Brad shook himself, and knew that it had been. He didn’t know what the hell he was waiting for. Music throbbed from behind the New Opal’s door, back-grounded by the rattle of glasses and throaty laughter. That much hadn’t changed.

But she might not be there, and that’s what was keeping him standing outside, keeping him afraid to go in. He shifted weight from his trick leg, barely conscious of the awed glances of passing Japanese. Brad was used to being stared at. He wasn’t pretty, by a damned sight. Thrusting helmets and grinding shoulder pads and sly elbows hadn’t improved on a face that wasn’t much to start with; the cleat scar twisting one corner of his mouth made him look particularly satanic. Except the devil never had such a repeatedly broken nose. And Brad was even bigger in this land of little men—towering over the slim people. Bulking wide and thick like one of their stone demons.

Inside, a girl laughed high and tinkly. Brad swallowed hard. It sounded like Sueko, but so had all the women he’d heard since the plane landed. And they all had something of her in them, some tilt of their bluesheen heads, some innate grace in their tripping walks. Maybe he had come back to Japan to seek only an image.

Brad shook his head again. No; Sueko was the only real thing he’d known. Time couldn’t build a fantasy around her, couldn’t brighten the aura she already had.

“Hey Joe.”

Brad looked down at the tug on his sleeve, at the kid grinning old and wise up at him.

“You want girl, Joe?”

“No,” Brad lied, glad for this outward impetus that shoved him at the doorway of the New Opal Hotel.

He had to stoop, and angle the width of his shoulders to pass through, and the place even smelled the same—eddying cigaret smoke, beersweet odors, the drifting scents of a dozen perfumes.

The girl came gliding from neon shadows, sway-hipping in a tight red gown that plunged low between the modeled cones of arching breasts. Midnight hair cascaded richly over creamed ivory shoulders; ripe lips parted in a damp smile; the direct almond eyes—and the woman smell of her touched with sandalwood and spices.

But it wasn’t Sueko.

“Hello,” the girl said, and put a pale butterfly hand against his arm.

B-girl; hustler, hostess—and she didn’t act like one; none of them did. Not like the c’mon-gimmie-a-drink wenches in San Francisco and New Orleans; not like the greedy broads in a hundred other Stateside towns. Gentle; unhurried; the here-for-your-desire girls of the Orient.

“Hello,” Brad said, lifting his eyes then to search the shadowed corners of the bar. One girl dealing herself a hand of solitaire at a tiny table, waiting for the evening rush to begin. Another sorting records at a portable phonograph, a young GI with his arm about her trim waist. The lacquered face of the madam behind the bar, waiting. No one else. But it was early; maybe Sueko hadn’t come down yet.

Brad glanced down at the girl again. “Mind silting at the bar? I’d like to talk to you.”

He saw the hidden wariness, the balanced intent-ness go out of her. He could almost sense the working of her mind, the relief that this big one wasn’t drunk and brutal, even if he was ugly. Brad smiled at her, the old cleat mark twisting his mouth high on one side. The adage about treating a prostitute like a lady never held truer than in Japan, where most of the “business girls” could give cards and spades to some of the “ladies” Brad knew in the States and still come out ahead.

He cupped the girl’s elbow, helped her lift to sit on the stool. Her smile turned genuine. The madam waited, expressionless. Brad lifted a mangled eyebrow at the girl. “Port wine still the drink?”

She blinked sloe eyes, nodded slowly. “If—you wish.”

Port wine, the B-drink of the Orient, Asiatic substitute for the “champagne” other girls across the sea were conning out of visiting firemen. It came in a champagne glass, all right—a pale purple squirt of wine over a double handful of crushed ice.

“O-sake for me,” Brad said. “Hot,” and marked himself as a man who’d been some time in the Far East.

The girl’s words were accented, but showed an effort to break away from typical GI English; her voice had a lilt to it. Like Sueko’s. “My name Marie,” she said.

“Or Mariko,” Brad said, “or maybe Machiko. Which is it?”

She dimpled. “Machiko, but GIs don’t say that. Marie easier,”

“Machiko is prettier; do you mind if I use it?”

Machiko covered momentary embarrassment with a sip at her wine. “No.”

Brad’s sake came in its little bowl of hot water. The small graceful bottle seemed lost in his big hand. He asked the question. “Is—Sueko still here?”

Prettily, she frowned. “Sueko?”

“Kamiya,” Brad said, hurrying, “Kamiya Sueko. She works here.”

Did she, after nine years? Did she still make the unconscious motion of drawing her hands up into the flowing sleeves of the yukata, turning the prosaic sleeping kimono into the shape of a hovering butterfly? Did she—

“Sueko,” he repeated, his hand clenching the smoothness of her arm. “You know Kamiya Sueko, don’t you?”

Machiko bit her lips. “P-please—”

Brad took his hand away. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

The girl moistened her mouth, dark eyes flicking beyond him. She started to say something.

“No Sueko here,” the madam said, at his elbow. “You got wrong hotel.”

Brad explained. It had been a long time ago, but this was the place. He remembered the rooms across the courtyard—one of them, anyway. He could describe that one to the last detail. Painted face showing nothing, the madam shrugged.

“Many girls,” she said. “All time come, go. No Sueko here now.”

Machiko’s eyes fell when the madam stared at her.

“Okay,” Brad said. “I’ll find her somewhere.”

When the madam drifted away, Brad told Machiko about the girl he was seeking. It had been Spring then; prophetically, it was Spring now, the startlingly fresh green bursting forth; the hint of cherry blossoms in clear air. And a younger Brad Saxon like the season’s early colt, bouncing awkwardly, without direction.

A bitter young man, certainly. With the stark coldness of black mountains too recently on him; with the icy hate of dirty little men and bright blood spilled on the alien snows of Korea.

Brad’s face hadn’t been so scarred then, but it was stamped with agonies and a deep-smouldering rage, an impotent, bottled-up anger that threatened to boil out and destroy all near it. Chronologically, he was young, but even the very young age swiftly in combat. At least, the survivors do.

And prisoners turn old even faster. Those that are left after death marches through the stained snow; those who remain after beatings and starvation and torture. When these things happen, men are ancient before their time, brittle and inwardly corroded by their hates.

Nine years after, and who remembered the shattered village of Kunu-ri? You found the name only in yellowed files of newspapers—and engraved on the souls of men who had bled there. Kunu-ri—and the remnants of the Indianhead Division staggering out of the valley, leaving all its artillery, most of its trucks and tanks behind it. Leaving 4,464 dead and missing.

Only all of them weren’t dead—yet. A thousand or so were left to be herded into stinking boxcars, to be prodded by bayonets and hammered with gun butts; to be left with ice films glazing blind eyes. Brad Saxon wouldn’t die like that. And he wouldn’t die in the horror of prison camps to the North.

They thought he was dead when the grimy men in padded uniforms marched his group off to one side of the railroad tracks and opened fire with their burp guns. And he would have been, except for the blood smeared on his face—sticky, hot blood seeping from the fresh corpse beside him.

He didn’t remember how long he lay in the trampled snow, stiff, listening to the short bursts of gunfire taking care of the wounded, to the singsong words and sadistic laughter of the slant-eyed animals who had the guns. An eternity crept by before they left, and another eon before Brad dared to lift himself from the heap of dead men. And it wasn’t over yet. There was a hundred miles of commie-infested mountains between him and the shocked and reeling outfit. Too far for a Caucasian in an Oriental country.

That’s what the books said, anyway. But Brad Saxon had men to kill, so he had to get back. Through frozen gullies, shadow-like over the rocks, a flat snake passing the sheeted ponds of rice paddies, he worked his way South. At Pakc’hon, he strangled a farmer greedy for the reward the Reds were offering for GIs. In Sinanju, he burned another in his ratnest shack. The flames drew guards off the road.

Hollow-eyed, staggering at times, Brad ran and slunk and stole his way toward the UN lines. And he made the hundred miles—only to find there was another hundred to go. Grinding dry rice between aching teeth, choking down odorous kimchi dug from buried crocks, Brad went on. He avoided sentries when he could. When he couldn’t, he killed them—with his hands, with a broken bayonet, with a loop made from his belt, and later, with accurate bursts from a Russian submachine gun.

The names of towns he’d never forget—Pyongyang, Sariwon, Kaesong, all of them seen only as blurs from a mountaintop, seen only as deadly shadows lurking in a breathheld night. Days fading into hungry weeks, into months. Then the capitol city of Seoul, gripped by victorious Chinese, a ghost city wailing lonely in frozen darkness. Across the numbing waters of the Han, crawling spent and beaten over the shell-pocked highway that led into Yongdongpo.

They were there—the spat! of an M-l, the belated challenge of a wary outpost guard. Brad Saxon was home, but he had more battles ahead. They tried to fly him out to Japan, but he crawled out of the tent hospital and hid until the plane was gone. He wolfed food, and shocked nurses and doctors by his determined calisthenics. It was vital that he get his body back into condition. There were beasts to kill, and Brad needed to kill them.

Technically, he was AWOL when he led a squad of yelling riflemen against a guerilla band—and led the merciless slaughter of them all. On the books, Brad was still a patient in the evacuation hospital when he was a platoon sergeant around whom a legend was building—a legend of revenge and death.

The Chinese stopped his war near Inje, with a bullet through the big tendons back of his left knee. This time, the medics got him aboard a plane, and he fumed helplessly in Tokyo Army Hospital, planning his escape back to Korea as soon as his wound healed. It didn’t work out that way.

They gave him a pass into the city, and Brad limped along the strange streets, eager for the taste and feel of a woman. Just any woman wouldn’t do; she had to be something special, someone softly feminine and giving and beautiful.

He wandered through the Kyobashi area, drinking in sounds and sights so different from Korea—different, and yet somehow familiarly the same. He looked for the girl, and didn’t find her in the glittering Shin-bashi bars. On a side street, in the New Opal Hotel, he found her. He found Sueko.

A soft hand closed on his arm, and Brad Saxon jumped.

“You don’t like me?”

A sameness in the tilt of oblique cheekbones, a sameness around a rosebud mouth. Brad came back to now, to the girl who wasn’t Sueko, but Machiko. He drained the bottle of sake, cooled now by the time he’d just spent in the past.

“Sure I like you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I guess I was dreaming.”

Machiko leaned toward him. The low swoop of her evening gown widened, exposing the dusky cleft between her breasts. She smelled clean, exciting.

“The other girl?”

Brad lifted two fingers at the hovering madam. “Yes. I came back to find her—and I will. Maybe not tonight; maybe next week, next month, but I’ll find her.”

Machiko kept her face lowered until the woman behind the bar served their drinks and moved away. Then she looked up. “I—hope so.”

She smiled at him through a rosy glow, over a parade of sake bottles that marched into his big hand. The night rush was on at the New Opal, a pair of soldiers drifting in to look over the merchandise, three more regulars greeted by delighted cries from the girls; the madam joined now by a jacketed bartender. The record player thundered; feet shuffled on the worn floor.

Machiko was sweet; she was sympathetic, and she looked very much like another girl he had once known. Right here in this place. Across the miniature courtyard and down a squeaky hall to a certain room. Suddenly, Brad had to see that room again. He lurched erect with Machiko pattering anxiously beside him. Mumbling apologies, he shouldered across the dance floor. Men frowned at him, but when his size and bulk registered with them, they moved out of his way.

There was no light behind the sliding panels of the remembered door. Brad swayed before it, staring at its blankness.

“This room?” Machiko asked, and when he nodded, she kneeled to remove his shoes.

The imitation Stateside bed was in its usual corner; the box dresser bare of the statue of Ho-Teh, fat, grinning god of health. It was cold.

“Oh hell,” Brad said, realizing that he was drunk, that the waiting and hoping were making him maudlin. “Oh hell,” he said again.

The door slid shut behind him. A dim bulb showed him the bones of the room, the unrumpled bed, the withered cherry branch with its tinseled good luck charms hanging dusty from an exposed rafter. It was all wrong. It shouldn’t be dim. It ought to be lighted with the glowing beauty of a tiny, modeled girl who tucked her little hands into the sleeves of her yukata and looked like a lovely butterfly.

With a delicate motion, Machiko moved in front of him, lifted her hands in an utterly feminine gesture and fluffed out her hair. Dark, searching eyes; dew on the petals of a morning flower; sandalwood and spice, and the urgent thrusting of desire making his belly taut and his loins rigid.

Alien girl, waiting to be sampled, to be tasted and felt; mystery woman, priestess of love cults, of bronze gongs soft in Spring twilight, of silks and satins and perfumed flesh. Fragile girl, so warm and small against the vastness of his body, her slippered feet dangling above the floor.

She held the flavor of warm winds over richly blooming fields, tasting of downy blossoms and far valleys. She was sweetly trembling in his arms, thick hair swirling as he let her go to wriggle out of her dress and bolt the door. She was entrancing hillocks and desirable vales, a flowing together of smooth-warm legs and softflare hips, a clasping, surrendering rocking of thighs and breasts, blending, enveloping. Gladly, he sought to lose himself in her.

And for the moment, she was even tinier, an elfin perfection that clung and spread, and loved in mad-wild passion and an intriguing, gentle tenderness.

He whispered it into the musky sheen of her hair: “Sueko—Sueko—”

She didn’t stiffen and roll away. If she was hurt, the girl didn’t show her pain. Instead, Machiko held him closer, substituting herself for the girl this huge, gentle man dreamed of, wishing in spite of herself that she was actually the one he sought. It would be nice to be so loved.

Brad Saxon sighed back from the girl at last, drained of hasty desire, relaxing in the heady aura of womanhood and the insiduous glow of the liquor within him. He was a little puzzled at the way she clung so fervently to him—as if she would never see him again. And he remembered the watchful caution of the hardfaced madam in the bar.